The Talking Cure

Edward Albee and Barbra Streisand back onstage.

You know how it is: you want to scream, and then you don’t scream, as your spouse—or whoever—asks, for the umpteenth time, Where did you put this or that, did you feed the kid or the dog, and how do I look? You answer the last question with all the love that tedium allows: you look fine, perfect, stunning. It doesn’t end there, though—the human need for approval is relentless. But how do I really look? Do I look (fill in the blank) fat, old, altogether unappetizing? And you are thrown into that strange, numbing state from which your marriage—or whatever—was meant to protect you: you feel isolated, invisible, a nonentity who isn’t heard, much less loved. What’s the point? You might as well be on your own. But, then, whom would you complain about? Who would be the target of all the iniquitous things you fantasize about saying? Your irritation is part of what defines you. So, when you go to see Edward Albee’s 1962 masterwork, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (in revival at the Booth, under the brilliant and original direction of Pam MacKinnon), for the first time, you feel what thousands of coupled people before you have felt: a mixture of relief and shame. Relief that what you imagined saying is being said so beautifully, and shame at your own weakness: when did repression become the basis of your relationship?

There’s a reason that Albee’s first full-length play is, like Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” (1952), a perennial favorite in acting classes and regional theatres: American audiences get off on theatrical indictments of their puritanical mores. The best homegrown comedies, from “You Can’t Take It with You” (1936) to “The Colored Museum” (1986), endure because they find ingenious ways to mess with our values. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” earns the hackneyed classification “tragicomic” because, for the most part, its tragedy unfolds as though it were a comedy: these people are stumbling around, drunk, angry, and horny—isn’t that funny? But, like “The Crucible,” Albee’s play is also steeped in a Gothic horror based on language, words that lead to hysteria—and perhaps to catharsis. It’s one of the few modern American plays in which, linguistically, the men get as good as they give—and this is acutely evident in Tracy Letts’s historic performance as the forty-six-year-old George, a college professor in a fictional New England town. Letts, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright himself, has a deep understanding of Albee’s writing, of how his words can jump up and slap you in the face, and of how they’re sometimes just sounds, free of the dramatically expressed “feelings” that Albee associates with so-called realistic theatre. Letts conveys all this as soon as he opens his mouth.

A dark living room, in 1962. There’s a crash, a woman giggles, and then the front door opens. A man turns on the lights. And there they stand, like middle-aged gladiators with overcoats as their useless shields: George and his wife, Martha (Amy Morton). Martha resembles an older Claire Danes—strong bones, a lithe body—but there’s something wrong with her face; she looks as if she were continually squinting through the glass of her dissatisfied present into a misbegotten past or a murky future. Glancing around the book-lined room, Martha says, “What a dump. Hey, what’s that from? ‘What a dump!’ ” George wants no part of the guessing game—it’s late, he’s tired—but wordplay is what binds him and Martha. So when she says that the line comes from some “goddamn Bette Davis picture,” he plays along, a little, telling her that it’s from the movie “Chicago”:

The couple use Albee’s italics like potholes in which the comfortable old vehicle of their marriage can rest for a bit before swerving off again, in search of danger.

The potential for disaster is what keeps their marriage sexy. And that sexiness is more apparent in this staging than in any other I’ve seen. George is usually played as a mouthy but recessive type, pussy-whipped in the extreme, who stands by warily while his wife revs up the action, an Abbott to her sad, crazy Costello. But Letts is a tall, dense man, as erotic and commanding in his silences as he is in his quips. His George stays with Martha because her repetitive, alcoholic thinking is part of what turns him on: he gets to protect her, to tote her liquor bottles night after night, to feel needed. At the same time, there’s something girlish about Morton’s impulses as Martha—the way she flings out her arms as she asks for a drink or lights a cigarette—and something reserved, too. Morton plays Martha’s critical acumen as a handicap. Although her father is the dean of the college, Martha is constricted by her lack of power. In this conservative post-“I Like Ike” world, she is a wife, a daughter, and a hostess. Because she longs to be more, she becomes Too Much, boozing and howling and embodying the male fear of woman as harridan. That works for George. And you just know that, after the nightly battles, they’re going to head off to bed. For this George and Martha, the best sex is makeup sex.

But, in order to get that drama going, they need to triangulate. They fix on Nick (the perfectly cast Madison Dirks), a new professor they’ve invited over after a faculty party, with his wealthy wife, Honey (the phenomenal Carrie Coon). Nick and Honey are young, but just as cynical, under their synthetic naïveté, as George and Martha. In fact, as MacKinnon directs them, Nick and Honey are even more corrupt, because Nick, at least, is more patently ambitious—he’ll fuck for advancement—whereas George and Martha are where they are less by design than by nature. Martha tries to get George to acknowledge this during the extraordinarily intense second act, when she makes a play for Nick, and George can’t articulate why he objects. Doing so would mean admitting who he is:

GEORGE: You can sit there in that chair of yours . . . and you can humiliate me, you can tear me apart . . . ALL NIGHT. . . .

MARTHA: YOU CAN STAND IT!

GEORGE: I CANNOT STAND IT!

MARTHA: YOU CAN STAND IT!! YOU MARRIED ME FOR IT!! (A silence)

GEORGE (quietly): That is a desperately sick lie.

In the play’s last moments, George begs Martha to be a person, not a performance. He tears down the illusory curtain that separates them from the world and asks for something that neither of them can quite imagine: a conversation in which they are unsure of what to say, one in which they have to learn to listen.

About a month before I went to see the theatrical force otherwise known as Barbra Streisand deliver one of her two “Back to Brooklyn” concerts, at the new Barclays Center, in downtown Brooklyn, I saw her perform at a memorial concert in honor of the late Marvin Hamlisch. Taking the stage at the Juilliard School, the seventy-year-old Streisand took us back to her first big show, “Funny Girl” (1964), for which Hamlisch was the rehearsal pianist. The name Marvin, she explained, was already familiar to her from her childhood in Brooklyn, and she imitated the way mothers would hang out of their windows as they called their own Marvins in for supper. At the Barclays Center, on October 11th (her North American tour continues through November 11th), on a stage ringed with glowing lights that evoked a Brooklyn stoop during the holidays, Streisand talked about where she had been since then, and what it meant for her to come back. This was met by cheers from the more than sixteen thousand fans in the audience, but there was something mournful, too, about Streisand’s return to the borough where, before she became a star, her singular looks—an Egyptian-Semitic queen—and talent were mocked or ignored. In a sense, the Streisand story—the story that kept the arena eerily quiet for almost three hours—was a distinctly American one: the world said no until she made it say yes.

Between tunes from her enormous catalogue, Streisand kept checking in with the audience: Were we O.K.? Did we know we were sitting in an ice rink? Were we a little chilly? She was still Barbra the kook we all knew—she of the knock-kneed stance and the healthy interest in food—but she was also a new Barbra: the Jewish mother, calling her Marvin in for supper. She introduced her son, the musician Jason Gould, who sang two songs. It was a risky proposition, but Gould, with his big-chested sound and his tentative trust in the audience, convinced everyone of his talent within seconds—while Mama sat proudly by, silently projecting her always interesting narrative about where difference can lead you. ♦

Hilton Als, The New Yorker’s theatre critic, has been a staff writer since 1994. He is the author of “White Girls.”